#fun with alpha testing

[clanheart]

Message from the developer

Hi everyone! So the launch of Alpha was pretty catastrophic to say the least. However, we have learned a tremendous amount in the last couple of days and we are now going to prepare some backend changes to the site to make it more stable. I just wanted to inform everyone of what is going on. Our main issue was the Image Generation script. It pretty much ate all our CPU up and then every other service crashed because of this. This then caused issues with the database and corrupted a lot of our tables. For some reason, my account got deleted in this after the repair- and I'm pretty sure a few others did too. I'm guessing those who had their accounts deleted won't see this message, so I'm going to pass it onto the staff to try and get the message out there. If you had an account during Alpha, but cannot login, you'll need to contact our Support Team. Using the Roar- How can we Help option and they'll investigate it further.  The next step is to: 1) Assess the current issue more in depth (now that we have the site live, we can investigate our current issues.) 2) Start making changes. I'm not sure how long this process will take. It'll probably involve a lot of testing and trial and error. 3) Restart Alpha. Since I think a lot of data was lost during the crash, I'm going to reset everyones accounts again. Things like pet images and other data is missing due to the crash, so it's easier just to restart from the beginning. For now, just be patient and when I have some updates for you, I'll ping the group ~Alpha . If the server goes down, check out http://status.clanheart.com/ for more updates.

[clanheart]

Alpha Tester familiars, common (green) and rare (pink).

[clanheart]

No questions/problems, just an eager un-patient player. \o/ Hope the backend is going well!

We configured our image generating server with Imagick, Redis, and php-resque in the last couple of hours. Great fun. We’re still waiting for the big server to be built and ready for us, which might happen tomorrow.

[clanheart]

Today’s final update

We’ve made a lot of progress today in hopefully taking the first steps to fixing the game up for alpha testing. Here’s what we’ve managed to achieve:

We’ve decided to move Clanheart over to a new hosting company and picked up one of their dedicated servers (for techies):

Intel Xeon E5-2630v3 [8 Cores @ 2.4 GHZ / 3.2 GHZ Turbo, Hyper-Threaded] (Hyper threading giving you 16 cores) 16GB DDR4 120GB Intel S3510 SSD (primary disk drive) 500GB WD Black (backup drive) 100Mbps Network Uplink 20TB Premium Transfer 2 IPs CentOS Linux 64-bit + cPanel/WHM Apache 2.4

This server will host the website itself. Our second decision is moving Clanheart’s image generation services (alphas, offspring, adults, etc) onto a server of its own, albeit a smaller one that the web server. What does this mean? Even if the online players are taxing the image server with requests, it won’t affect the web server and the web server should not lag.

We will hopefully be able to get our new server company’s support in changing over all of the databases to the new InnoDB engine while they are busy migrating the website to the new server.

After this new migration is complete and all tables have been converted to InnoDB, we will be working on connecting all of the existing image generation scripts to the secondary image generator server. When that is complete, we will open the game up again and see how it handles players interacting with it. If all goes well, image generation may still be slow, but you should not be encountering the extreme slowdown of the game that you did before (which means you could wait for images to generate in one tab, while exploring other parts of the game in another, if desired).

When can you expect Clanheart to be back up for alpha testing? A conservative estimate is within 48-72 hours. We have been given a 24-48 hour waiting period for configuration of the new server and the migration of Clanheart’s data. After that, it will probably take less than 24 hours for the programmer to alter the existing scripts to reflect our new Web Host | Image Host split.

One last thing to mention: dedicated servers are not cheap, and we discussed this in the past that hosting Clanheart on a dedicated server prior to Kickstarter is a difficult expense. Based on the advertising revenue logged for yesterday, we may be able to squeak by in paying for the alpha servers with the advertising revenue it generates. For this reason, if you are able, it is crucial that you turn off AdBlockers when accessing Clanheart. We may not be able to afford the servers if we don’t have the advertising revenue.

A couple of quick P.S.: no, you don’t need to re-register to come back onto alpha, and no, if you already made your alpha clan member, you don’t need to remake it. Yes, if you skipped adult creation due to lag, you can return to it and select an adult. And yes, we know about the gender bug.

[clanheart]

Good news!

This is something we didn’t exactly want to talk about until we could confirm we could either fix it or not fix it, but some further information on the table corruption reported earlier: essentially, the users table broke and deleted everyone but 29 users.

But! We got them back after figuring out how to repair the corrupted data (thanks to a cool guest developer from Toyhouse). All 5,938 of you. Safe, in Clanheart’s clutches.

For some reason those 29 were special, though. Immune from the MYSQL corruption that destroyed the other, weaker accounts. How many of you were from the stretch of account #1 (ClanStaff) to account #29?

I think our alpha familiar is going to be based off corruption. Something slimy and black and creepy that looks vaguely like it crawled out of a toxic swamp. The destroyer of all but 29.

[clanheart]

Technical Fun

For those of you who like behind the scenes information, we're looking into switching our database engine from myISAM to InnoDB. The programmer is away right now for a few hours (hey, game admins have lives too) but when he comes back we'll try restoring the corrupted table and switch the database engine. We're also looking at a dedicated server from a new company, as we've been chatting with them and like their helpfulness and response time to help tickets. We also have been using our networking to get ahold of a server admin from a neighboring site who may be able to help us set up a functional environment.